Ancient Greek Accentuation

Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory

Philomen Probert

Description

The accent of many Greek words has long been considered arbitrary, but Philomen Probert points to some striking correlations between accentuation and a word's synchronic morphological transparency, and between accentuation and word frequency, that give clues to the prehistory of the accent system. Bringing together comparative evidence for the Indo-European accentuation of the relevant categories with recent insights into the effects that loss of transparency and word frequency have on language change, Probert uses the synchronically observable correlations to bridge the gap between the accentuation patterns reconstructable for Indo-European and those directly attested for Greek from the Hellenistic period onwards.

Ancient Greek Accentuation

Synchronic Patterns, Frequency Effects, and Prehistory

Philomen Probert

Table of Contents

I 1. Evidence for the Greek accent2. Some background on Greek accentuation3. Continuity and change in Greek accentuation4. A brief history of scholarship on the Greek accentII 5. Introduction to Part II6. Words with the suffix7. Words with the suffix8. Words with the suffix9. Words with the suffix10. Preliminary conclusions11. Words with the suffix12. Complex Caland formations13. Summary and further consequences